Christopher Boyce, the Cold War traitor whose spying for the Russians was chronicled in the film "The Falcon and the Snowman," is free after spending almost half his life in federal prison.

Boyce, 50, was paroled at 4 a.m. Friday from a halfway house he hated in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. He will remain on parole until Aug. 15, 2046, his original release date.

It was not immediately clear where Boyce was headed, but he recently married a San Francisco woman he met several years ago. Boyce, an intensely private man who shuns the media, could not be reached for comment.

Boyce was 22 when his father, a former FBI agent, helped him land a job at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach. He eventually gained access to the "Black Box" vault that held communications with CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Boyce and his childhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee -- they had been altar boys together -- soon started selling classified intelligence documents to the Russian Embassy in Mexico City.

They sold thousands of documents, compromising a sensitive satellite system and damaging negotiations over nuclear weapons treaties, over the course of a year. They were paid $77,000 before they were caught.

Boyce was convicted of espionage in 1977; Lee also was convicted of espionage and was paroled in 1998.

In 1997, Boyd persuaded the U.S. Parole Commission to grant him early release. After spending almost half of his life in various federal prisons, Boyce was released in September from a medium-security prison in Sheridan, Ore. , and sent to a halfway house in San Francisco.

He made headlines in 1980 when he escaped from federal prison in Lompoc; he remained on the run for 19 months and supported himself by robbing banks in the Pacific Northwest.

But it was the 1985 film "The Falcon and the Snowman" that cemented his fame. The film starred Timothy Hutton as Boyce, who loved falconry, and Sean Penn as Lee, nicknamed "Snowman" because of a drug habit.